The heavy weight of diet culture
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This is Ira Glass of This American Life. Do you know our show? Okay, well, either way, I'm going to tell you about it. We make stories that hopefully pull you into the beginning with funny moments and feelings and people in surprising situations, and then you just want to find out what is going to happen and cannot stop listening. That's right. I'm talking about stories that make you miss appointments. This American Life, wherever you get your podcasts.
I don't think, you know, parents were often thinking about, how do I talk to my daughter? in the 90s about diet culture. I mean, they were just entrenched in it. That's like thinking you could see air. Nobody said diet culture in the 90s. No, it wasn't a term. I mean, yes, there's a cultural disappearing that we're all naming. But I think parents are a lot more aware of the need to have these conversations. Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Luce, and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident.
Over the last few years, it's become impossible to ignore the shrinking size of celebrities and influencers. Threading the needle of expressing concern without causing harm can be difficult. But what harm might we cause if we say nothing at all? To discuss how we talk about weight online, we're joined by licensed psychologist Dr. Vanessa Scaringi and Angelina Chapman, features writer at The Cut. Vanessa, Angelina, welcome to It's Been a Minute. Thanks for having us.
So nice to be here.
I'm happy to have you both here. This is a really important topic and I'm excited to have both of your minds on it. So to start things off, when did you first notice that celebrity women's bodies were overall trending smaller? Angelina, we'll start with you.
So I think... For me, it was post COVID like post real lockdowns. We saw Ozempic being talked about more. Like I think that's when we first started us in the mainstream started to hear this drug exists. It's sort of this celebrity elixir. I remember then moments sort of in dribs and drabs like, Oh, Amy, now I'm now Amy Schumer's there and she's a lot more thin and she's talking about liposuction. And then there was the wicked press tour for the first movie that obviously brought up a lot of dialogue around Ariana's weight and, I think there was a season three of Emily in Paris sometime in that period. Like it just felt like a bit of a curtain open and now we're in the world and people are looking a little different.
So I'm not sure I clocked it as like just thinness necessarily, but end of last year, it really just felt like the red carpet was, is a parade of skeletons. That's how I felt. Just looking at these images, boom, boom, boom, boom. Everyone just looked a lot more thin. And that's when it felt like sort of a trend worth naming for me.
And Vanessa, like, had you noticed this as well? Yeah, I mean, clinically, absolutely. I think, you know, eating disorders were on the rise during COVID even. But I do, you know, I pay attention to some of the celebrity stuff as well. And obviously, the introduction of Ozempic was like a game changer. And I remember Kim Kardashian's Met Gala. Reveal of like when she lost a bunch of weight to fit into the Marilyn Monroe dress. And I just I remember feeling like, okay, now we're talking about weight loss publicly again in a kind of a gross way. Yeah, I was born in the late 80s. So I lived through the 90s as a girl child and was a teenager in the early 2000s. So I feel like a lot of my formative years were kind of shaped that.
by talking about weight, I think in the way that you're discussing Vanessa, like in a very obvious, very blatant, not couched at all manner where the idea, the assumption, the underlying assumption is that thinner is better. Well, the underlying assumption, also the pretty over assumption is that thinner is better. But I noticed that sort of change in the way that people, not just celebrities, but everyday people and even everyday people talking about celebrities
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